The Trump Presidency Turns Deadly

Harry Truman famously had a sign on his White House desk that read, “The buck stops here”: ultimate responsibility for the country’s welfare rests with the president. Now contrast that with how the current occupant of the Oval Office has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

WASHINGTON, DC – For the first three years of his administration, US President Donald Trump focused on consolidating power. And yet, as the United States approached its greatest domestic peril in a century, he refused to use that power. Instead, as a deadly coronavirus was poised to invade the country, the president opted for denial and delay.

But toward the end of March, Trump’s science advisers presented him with evidence from a voluntary 15-day experiment indicating that where social distancing measures were taken seriously, the disease spread less rapidly than in places where such restrictions were not observed. At the time, the number of COVID-19 infections was over 100,000 and deaths exceeded 1,000. Science advisers’ models indicated that if people behaved perfectly, 100,000-240,000 US residents would die, and Trump’s political advisers told him that polls showed the public wanted to extend social distancing. For once, he took the sensible approach, extending the federal government’s recommendation of social distancing for another 30 days, until the end of April.

At long last, Trump, who just days earlier proclaimed that he would lift all restrictions and “reopen” the US economy by Easter (April 12) – which he couldn’t do because the business shutdowns had been ordered by state governors – seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously. Earlier, he had also dismissed the Democrats’ criticism of his handling of the crisis as “their new hoax.” He took over the daily news briefings when he noticed that Vice President Mike Pence, whom he had put in charge of the emergency task force, was winning praise for conducting the sessions. And then he bragged about the TV ratings. But his behavior remained uneven, and he continued his harsh attacks on reporters who pressed him on his slow response.

In denying responsibility for the appalling state of unreadiness the country was in, Trump sometimes claimed, falsely, that “nobody knew” there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion (at another point he claimed that he had known all along a pandemic was coming). As usual, he blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama. In fact, as early as January, intelligence agencies had warned the Trump administration of the imminent approach of the coronavirus.

But despite persistent efforts over this period, administration officials were unable to get the president to focus on the looming crisis. To the public as well, he dismissed the coronavirus and the resulting disease, COVID-19, as less deadly than the seasonal flu. When he had reason to know better, on February 24, he assured the public that the coronavirus rampage “is very much under control in the USA.” Trump said on March 31 that he had been upbeat previously because he “wanted to give people hope,” but according to press reports he was just as dismissive of the problem privately as he was in public.

Trump is precisely the wrong person to lead the US at such a moment. Neither the brightest nor the most focused of presidents, he’s clearly out of his depth. His resistance to reality left doctors and nurses without sufficient personal protective equipment, and as a result, some have died. Moreover, the stunning lack of test kits left policymakers flying blind about where and how many infections were occurring. Trump’s bottomless need for praise led him to make preposterous claims, such as that the number of tests being performed in the US was “very much on par” with that of other countries.

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This denial of reality affected the administration’s working relationships with state governors. Trump listened too much and for too long to his economic advisers, who for weeks convinced him to put business interests ahead of the public’s health. And he refused to invoke the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, which allows a president to order a business to meet a national emergency, before finally relenting on March 27 and ordering General Motors to begin manufacturing desperately needed ventilators.

There were also signs of political favoritism, with certain governors – such as Trump’s fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis of Florida – receiving more federal assistance than Democratic governors, with whom Trump picked fights. The US federal system has been both an obstacle and a salvation in dealing with the coronavirus: it has led to policy confusion and has also been a smokescreen for Trump’s incompetence.

Trump still refuses to nationalize the crisis, leaving the states to take different approaches and bid against one another for emergency equipment. The key to his approach may well lie in something he said when asked at a mid-March press conference if he took responsibility for the shortage of face masks. “No,” he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” In other words, let the governors take responsibility for any failures.

Such blame-shifting has become the norm for Trump and Republican leaders, Pence, for example, blamed China, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By late March, Republicans had begun arguing that the Democrats’ January impeachment of Trump had distracted him from the pandemic threat. But the timing doesn’t work: the impeachment episode was over by early February. Bill Clinton was legislatively active while he was being impeached.

We may never know what Trump actually thinks about the pandemic. What we do know is that COVID-19 is taking an ever-increasing toll. By April 2, the death count in the US had climbed to more than 5,000, and the number of infections had risen to nearly 217,000. Worldwide, nearly one million people have been infected by the virus, about which much remains a mystery – including how long it will torment us.

On the economic front, US unemployment claims increased by a stunning 6.6 million in the week ending April 1 (a figure that includes only those who filed for benefits, which is increasingly difficult to do, because labor offices have been overwhelmed). A deep and long recession is all but certain.

Whenever the crisis has passed, there will be numerous studies of what happened and why. The hardest question to face, and one that will be long debated, is how many people died needlessly as a result of Trump’s leadership.

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Hmmm... how would Ms. Drew have reacted to the FDR's actions before and after Pearl Harbor? Using her analytic approach to the crisis, FDR would have been a mass murderer. This kind of our TDS ranting is way below the intellectual standards we have come to expect from Project Syndicate.

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We need to settle down. Trump is not a physician or any sort of scientist. He is simply following the lead of his medical advisors. Fauci has been head of NIAID since 1984. Dr. Birx was director of worldwide AIDS program since 2005. These are the same people who were in charge of government response to SARS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu. If errors have been made this time (such as failure to develop a test for COVID-19 soon enough), the blame is on the government agencies themselves. Vote against Trump by all means, but don't kid yourself. Anyone who has worked for any really large corporation or government agency has seen this before. Somewhere down the line, there was a failure, which went unreported or unnoticed by the higher-ups. Not only was the needed process delayed, but the failure created other problems which delayed addressing the basic problems. Nothing to be done now, but keep our heads and focus on doing what seems best. If this is a failure, it's a failure of the system (whether American, Chinese, Italian, etc.) to deal with it in a timely fashion.

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With the reinforcement of opacity that is already included in the Virus packet, the firing of Inspector General Atkinson eliminates any and all accountability that really is non-existent in the packet. It's another dose of a secret viral delivery. There is now confirmation process in progress that there will be NO oversight in that 2-TrillionUSD + 100 plus page document. I presume that the Democrats were quite cognizant of the real gameplay, also in advance. So what was delivered publicly is just another level of nonsense. There is no packaging of even relevant lies left at all.

Pretty soon, I won't even have one solitary reason to even read Project Syndicate.

Elizabeth Drew is a notable public figure whose commentary should receive serious consideration. Having said this, it is lamentable that commentary on a crisis as serious as the present would should be distilled into another partisan attack. Say what you will about Trump's personal style, thus far he has not led the US into any new wars and appears sincerely to be attempting to close down old ones. The rest of his presidency thus far has been a combination of defending against incessant investigations and impeachments and attempting to deliver on other campaign promises.

People talk on breathless terms about the president, but the problem is the presidency This country is to complex to be run by one person whether a narcissist or not. It’s the same problem with health insurance companies. They should not exist problem solved.A system based on collective intelligence, skills and talents is required. Which is readily possible with cell phone technology platforms now existingEntropy is increasing due to the inappropriate structure of the solutionsThe failure of money printing has appeared You have the money but cannot buy the can of soup you always buy for your daughter because it is out of stock everywhereSo people are bartering eggs for paper towels this was in the newsThe federal reserve said all problems could be solved by hitting the print buttonNow they have been proven wrongIt’s Venezuela without hyperinflation

TESLA's order of so-called machines, is and was BAD EFFORT, based on BAD INTENT. It is an absolute deplorable action by people that know not to perform in that manner, nor at that level of deceit. Tesla's shipment of inappropriate goods should be sent back to Tesla, all expenses related to any aspect of the original processing of the order by ALL INVOLVED, should be ordered by Presidential power to be paid in retribution to the most needy students first, across the United States. That includes any body and everyone to the top of the chain of command that had anything to do with any step of the process. ACCOUNTABILITY is essential to eliminate mis-appropriation of funding during the pandemic event resolution process. The Secretary of Education(or whatever labelled cabinet position of authority, if one still exists in fact) should have already addressed nationwide, all real-world processing by human beings, and financial funding to have prevented the reality, as referenced in the above article from US News.

That above real fact should be what the POTUS should really be embarrassed about. He should take that event as probably the MOST and BIGGEST embarrassment of the present administration of individual powers.

NPR from 2017- to 2020 sure doesn't show much real progress for Justice. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/825950397/companies-tied-to-w-va-governor-to-pay-5-million-in-mining-violationshttps://www.npr.org/2017/08/03/541460116/west-virginia-governor-expected-to-switch-to-gop-at-trump-rally

Looks like Politico may throw a little light on a bit of what the COVID package sure wants to keep under wraps. Just do a bit of discovery about the condition that those HUD units are in in Baltimore, that the POTUS family owns. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/jared-kushner-company-benefit-recovery-bill-162652

Accountability is the most significant problem that is NOT being resolved, but of course, when the course is strategically deadly, and against the best interests of any majority what is the only expectation?

Perhaps, once the cards fall, maybe the pathetic attempts to replace governmental administrative process can be done by people with PMI creditation,(or equivalents) and use of independent software that is not owned by the Gang of 2,3, or 4 can expose the failure of blind loyalty, and bad kinship principles of certain applications, especially in documentation of budget costs, results from specific contracts, and tracking accountability of the players.

It is rumoured that the POTUS has the right to postpone US elections so that he can concentrate on solving this deadly COVID19 crisis without getting distracted by election issues and by being blamed by Democrats? After all it is for the higher good of the society.

The COVID hysteria will be forgotten well before November... and the economy will be rebounding. It will not be in the President's interest to cancel an election he is certain to win by a wide margin against the Democrat's finest possible candidate.

Trump may be the wrong person to lead the US in this time but this crisis is the right one to show Trump and his cronies for who and what they really are. The world will not be rid of Trump until the American people are ready to reject him as their president. In that respect, things are going well.

Looks like the real blame game is for the present absconders to run away with more as the global cabal attempts to dump all debt onto the regional and local banking system, and US taxpayers, who don't have anything left since all the last of the imaginary 2% float has already been wrung out of the real economic dynamics way before yesterday.

Hopefully, there are a few left at the local and regional banks that will NOT fall for the last of the not-royal con game: "Treasury Department said on Tuesday that lenders will be responsible for preventing fraudulent claims by verifying borrower eligibility, which is determined by a few measures including the borrower’s number of employees and its average monthly payroll costs.That's not all: banks also must take steps to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, a process that would normally take weeks, the sources said. Additionally, banks are concerned they could face regulatory penalties or legal costs down the line if things go awry in the haste to get money out the door. But at the same time they are worried they will be blamed for not moving funds fast enough if they perform due diligence the way they would under normal circumstances, the sources said.RE: mandated interest rate on the loans: community banks said the Treasury’s guideline interest rate of 0.5% will be unprofitable, and that many small banks will not have sufficient liquidity to front up the loans (this, as we said yesterday, may have been a primary consideration for the Fed to release Treasuries and deposits from the Supplementary Leverage Ratio test, effectively opening up over $1 trillion in additional loan capacity across the US banking sector)." from: SBA, ZH, Politico, Reuters etc.https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/hours-its-start-treasurys-small-business-bailout-verge-collapse

This entire scheme is to divert all responsibility for the FRAUD that has already occurred on to local, and regional independent banking systems.

Yeah, sure, like overnite IT. Pull IT out of your uh_ _ _!!!

I hope there are some folks left in the GOP and the local and regional banks with some common cents left not to get sucked into the last phase of this global FRAUD fiasco!!! (Yes, it's global. Check with Roubini.)

This is a sham to push all defaulted loan loss to the FDIC, which can NOT cover the debt. The MNE, VC funds, and corporate ownership of small business fronts, franchises, especially any LLC's front, REIT packages with ultimate ownership in the Caymans, and Bermuda will carry default international court scenario's into the 22nd Century. In the meantime, Saudi Arabia/Russia/China walks in behind the nibbles of the Kushner Pineapple.

Setup a creditline, with scaled credit line access points, carried on FB books, with special arrangements with the IBS, over 50 years, or whatever timeline "works" as a capitalization offset for every cent that FB has stolen from the global population, starting with the US. I'm sure some guys can make the fantasy work just fine against one monopoly if not more to balance the fictitious global ledger. This is NOT a small business administration, nor independent banking system fiasco. This is a problem that is the result of a strategized, and manufactured CON game.

RE: relative philanthropy of certain platforms: "As of October 2018, Lendio Gives had funded[8] 4,100 microloans to entrepreneurs across 78 countries totalling $104,000.In October 2018, Lendio announced[2] it had serviced $1B in total loans to over 51,000 small businesses across the country, generating an estimated $3.8B in economic output."

That works out to not even the level of nano-seconds, or anything that can be exchanged as cents, in an imaginary world of the 21st century.

99% of the US citizens are essentially imprisoned, with no permission to venture out of their confinement. 99% of the US citizens essentially will have any mobility only as granted by probably Kushner's work-around group that is now over lord of FEMA, and any administrative hierarchy any where in the US, that directs any aspects of Public Health administration. And guess what contracts his brother will be able to obtain in the medical industry, as an entitlement that is only appropriate for the appropriate selected group?

The unemployment claim data is such an anomoly of reasonable statistical trending that labor data is beyond hysterical. The entire economy has been decimated on the drop of a command from Who, or Whom, What, Where, and no, it's not due to a virus. Cut through the smoke screen of a nonsensical and opportunistically timed trigger.

And we are all acquiescing as the nice behaving appropriate citizens that we should be? While Kushner and company take over every bit of functionality of any Federal, State, and local operations, courtesy of CEI, etal. Thank you GITHUB? Another day, and all the dollars, you sure got IT!

A monkey he may well be, but whatever he happened to do here he was cornered. If he had quarantined the entire US when the count was low, you would be here claiming he wrecked the economy for nothing. America's failure with the virus is collective effort. Countries who effectively stopped it - China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan - they all just put on masks when going into public. They know the drill and they follow the plan.

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Mass protests over racial injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a sharp economic downturn have plunged the United States into its deepest crisis in decades. Will the public embrace radical, systemic reforms, or will the specter of civil disorder provoke a conservative backlash?

For democratic countries like the United States, the COVID-19 crisis has opened up four possible political and socioeconomic trajectories. But only one path forward leads to a destination that most people would want to reach.

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